It’s about time I picked up the task of finishing my myths posts! For the original post, click here.
Myth #7: Media produced for language learners counts as authentic materials (or, “The ‘First Semester of Spanish Love Song’ is the best video ever!”)
Most media in the world language classroom is a taco. It’s not just any taco. It’s a Taco Bell taco.
Taco Bell took the concept of a taco – corn tortilla, meat, toppings – and made it a mass-market hit in the American quest for more fast food. But they fried the tortilla. They added lettuce. They made it as American as the hot dog.
Never in my travels in Mexico or Latin America have I eaten a taco with a hard shell. My favorites are the tacos from the little taquerías on the border – the ones where you’re pretty sure you might get food poisoning but it’ll be worth it. With tacos de barbacoa in soft corn tortillas, piping hot, with cilantro and onion on the side, sliced lime to squeeze on top, and a little container of ranchero beans. (Hungry yet?)
What’s my point? Taco Bell tacos are food (well, most people think so anyway). They’re pretty tasty. But they’re not authentic. They’ve tricked you into accepting a substitute.
Curriculum companies have tricked you into accepting a substitute by pairing cheesy, expensive media they’ve produced with their outdated, expensive curricula.
Spanish Mike and ¿Qué hora es? have tricked you into accepting a substitute by telling you that because students laugh, they’ll learn something (in a video that is about students not learning anything). Señor Wooly is fun and comprehensible, but if that’s the only major vehicle of media exposure for your students, you’ve been sucked into believing this myth.
Authentic media is media produced by native speakers for native speakers of the language. By my definition, most translations (like Cajas de cartón, one of our Spanish 3 novels) are authentic, because they are produced by native speakers for native speakers.
I don’t mean that you have to do only 100% authentic media. My YouTube videos below are all inauthentic. Sure, students could use a laugh from Spanish Mike to take the edge off an upcoming assessment. But don’t fool yourself that they’re learning much. Flooding our students with media produced for language learners has produced students who cannot understand authentic audio or text. It’s crippling them.
“But they’re only in Spanish 1,” you say. For more on that, stay tuned for myths 8 and 9: Low-level learners can’t understand authentic materials and students have to understand everything they hear.
Play them pop music and news, weather reports and movie trailers. Show them advertisements and read short stories and biographies and news articles and interviews and Facebook fan pages. Coach them through using level-appropriate strategies and questions.
You can sing, dance, laugh, and eat Taco Bell all you want, but you’ll just continue to do what we’ve done for years: produce students who can [briefly] rap a verb conjugation but can’t order a real taco, hold the onion please.
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Just must say, YES! A good challenge to put out there.
Thank you!
This is great!
I love your site! You have been a role model for me as I have tried to evolve as a language teacher.
I was all about authentic input last year – I played my students music from all over the Spanish speaking world – salsa, vallenato, pop, rock, hip-hop, norteño, electronic, I also used the proficiency interviews from Texas, and commercials from all over the world (thanks zachary jones!) This was at the Spanish II level.
However, as much as my students enjoyed the music (they loved it!), it wasn’t ever really comprehensible to them. I gave them the lyrics or dialogues in Spanish so that they could see them as well. We did cloze exercises, and exercises in which they did mini-reviews of what songs they liked or didn’t like. However, the aural input for the most part simply was not comprehensible. They couldn’t understand what they heard. At best they were picking up a few words here and there that they understood, at worst it might as well have been in Chinese. It was really fast, with tons and tons of vocabulary or slang that they had never seen before. At the end of the year, looking back it didn’t seem like the most effective use of class time because it wasn’t comprehensible input. They got something out of it (motivation, appreciation for culture, a few expressions here and there) but not in any way that they thoroughly acquired.
I grant you that those benefits are there, but they seem to be quite limited. I taught at a prestigious summer immersion program as well that demanded all authentic material and 100% target language use. At the lower level, where I was teaching, I followed the curriculum to a T, brought in interesting and appropriate authentic materials, had students who were more motivated than the norm, and still at the end felt that they could have learned more in an environment where the focus was on comprehensible input rather than authentic input. The upper levels were different in my experience because they had enough time already in the language that much more of my authentic materials were appropriate for them. But at the lower level, simply telling them that they would eventually adjust to the pace of the language in songs or videos seemed to be somewhat cruel.
I would be really interested to hear what strategies you use at the lower levels to make songs or videos comprehensible. I find it very difficult to make the great majority of the material I used in the past comprehensible in a significant way to my students. If you could continue to explain that more, it would be greatly helpful.
I still plan on, and am, using lots of music in my classroom. Some of it will be authentic, but some of it probably will be Señor Wooley or others like him because I think it is more important that all of it be comprehensible. Obviously, the joke Spanish of ¿Qué hora es? , or 1st semester love song are not anything to be used as anything but a laugh. But I don’t know that we are producing students who can`t understand authentic Spanish because we don`t use enough authentic materials in the classroom. It seems to me that we aren’t producing those students because the vast majority of teachers are not speaking 90% target language in the classroom, and are focusing on form (conjugation charts) over meaning (activities focused on communication).
I would love to hear your response, and the strategies that you use,
best,
Dave
Hi Sara-Elizabeth!
I’m kind of between agreeing with you and agreeing with Dave. Can I be diplomatic and say you both have some really great points?
I love using authentic materials in my classes at all levels, and in fact I am mildly obsessed with finding things to share with my classes! However, I also agree with Dave that it isn’t a good idea to leave students in an area of low-comprehension for very long. Frustration will set in, it will just be filtered out as noise. In speaking with Stephen Krashen about my use of pop music in my classes, he said that the more interested the students are in the content, the more likely they will put up with the “noise.” By noise he means incomprehensible input.
I think that there are some good “bridges” to arrive at the authentic stuff. In fact, my ACTFL presentation on this very topic was called “Bridging the Gap to Authentic Resources for Novice Learners.”
I use storytelling (TPRS), readers created for language learners (the language is authentic but lower-level and controlled for a more limited vocabulary, not necessarily controlled for grammatical structures), songs made for language learners, and non-fiction readings that I create by adapting authentic non-fiction information.
Once I have “bridged the gap” by providing gentle comprehensible input, my students are much more receptive to authentic resources which are then that much more comprehensible.
Another challenge with using only authentic materials if you are a believer in comprehensible input is that it is really tough to find things that work. Oftentimes the authentic materials that are comprehensible are not very meaty. To use your analogy, kind of like tacos al pastor missing the pork.
By using what I call “semi-authentic” materials (no, Mike still doesn’t qualify!) I can put lots of very robust, real language in the grasp of my students. Again, nothing I say or play or have them read is “dummy Spanish.” But rather real Spanish with a few controls on the “boundaries” of where I take them with the vocabulary.
I know you have lots going on this week, but I echo Dave in that I am looking forward to your reply to his concerns. I feel like you and I generally see eye-to-eye! I am also looking forward to exploring this beautiful new website of yours!
Take care!
Kristy
kplacido.com
I’m finally taking a minute to sit down and give this comment the time it deserves, Dave and Kristy! Thanks so much for both comments – you make many good points. This issue of authentic materials is such a muddy area to navigate, and it’s why teachers often give up and resort to Sing Dance Laugh, etc. Be sure to keep an eye out for the next myth post on why students don’t have to understand everything they hear, and that novice learners can’t understand authentic materials.
First, Dave, certainly a lack of target language and a focus on forms are MAJOR reasons that students aren’t gaining and useful level of proficiency. However, I truly believe that this one area is the principal reason students don’t have high proficiency in the interpretive (listening in particular) mode. I came to this conclusion after I’ve inherited class after class of Spanish 3 students who cannot understand native Spanish. And by “native Spanish,” I don’t mean that they can’t understand the lyrics of Mi Niña Bonita. I mean they can’t understand a native speaker introducing himself. Why? Because for 2 years they’ve been listening to the teacher model introductions. They’ve been listening to each other introduce themselves. But they’ve never been asked to understand a native speaker introduce himself.
Herein lies the key answer to your question – students have to be assured and reassured that they are not meant to understand everything they hear in authentic materials. To push students to useful proficiency in this area, you start with proficiency-based questions where they are and then move on to higher questions when they get that. So in the song Minutos by Ricardo Arjona, I don’t need them to understand the nuances of the song. I don’t need them to understand all the lyrics. They are not allowed to feel frustrated if they don’t understand. I just want them to understand the phrases where he tells the time. I’ll play it over and over – someone will get it, then most will get it, then everyone will get it, but that’s all I need from them. I’m asking a question suited to their proficiency level even as I push their proficiency. Does this make sense?
I do not believe in 100% comprehensible input for two reasons. One, it is entirely unrealistic. It does not even reflect the way language is naturally acquired. Second, I’ve seen what happens when teachers spend their time feeding students learner language: they produce students who cannot understand anything but learner language. I believe it’s more important to give them the right questions and the right tools to answer them as they become more and more accustomed to the way language really happens.
I hope this helps!
[…] I wrote about myth 7, I compared Taco Bell (audio made for language learners) to real Mexican tacos (authentic audio). […]